REYNOSA, Mexico - Heavy gunfire echoed along the main thoroughfare and across several neighborhoods in a firefight that lasted for hours, leaving perforated and burned vehicles scattered across the border city.

Social media exploded with reports of dozens dead. Witnesses saw at least 12. But the hours of intense gun battles in Reynosa on March 10 gave way to an official body count the next day of a head-scratching two.

The men who handle the city's dead insist the real figure is upward of 35, likely even more than 50. Ask where those bodies are and they avert their eyes and shift in their seats. Cartel members, they say, are retrieving and burying their own casualties.

Arab League seats Syrian opposition

BEIRUT - A Syrian opposition coalition was seated as the legitimate government of Syria at an Arab League summit Tuesday, and the coalition's outgoing leader promptly pushed for the United States to use Patriot missile-defense batteries against Syrian warplanes.

Moaz Khatib, who resigned from the opposition coalition Sunday amid reports of deep divisions in its ranks, said he put the Patriot missile request to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a meeting last month in Rome.

U.S. officials later said there was no plan to change the strictly defensive posture of Patriot missiles placed in Turkey.

NATO has deployed Patriot batteries along the Turkish-Syrian border as a protection from any incoming missile attacks from Syria.

N. Korea: Hawaii, mainland targets

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea's military said it placed all its missile and artillery units on "the highest alert" on Tuesday, ordering them to be ready to hit South Korea, as well as the United States and its military installations in the Pacific islands of Hawaii and Guam.

The threat from the North's Korean People's Army Supreme Command came only hours after President Park Geun-hye of South Korea warned that the North Korean leadership could ensure its survival only when it abandons its nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, provocations and threats.

In its latest threat, North Korea said on Tuesday that all its strategic rocket and long-range artillery units "are assigned to strike bases of the U.S. imperialist aggressor troops in the U.S. mainland and on Hawaii and Guam and other operational zone in the Pacific as well as all the enemy targets in South Korea and its vicinity."

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